News & Blog

Read the latest business news, blogs and thought leadership articles from our members, as well as updates on the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce's work in the city.

Ignore These 3 SEO Issues at Your Peril!

Posted: 27th April 2018

Search engine optimisation or SEO is being utilised by businesses big and small to increase traffic and conversions onsite. The stakes are high as Google AdWords and Bing Ads are gaining more and more real estate on the search results page pushing organic listings further down. To get any traffic requires your SEO campaign to be firing on all cylinders. But here are 3 common issues that we sometimes find during an SEO audit which might be harming your SEO efforts despite all your efforts on keywords and link building.

Poor page speed

First up is a failure to address page speed. Google makes it fairly obvious that page loading time is important by providing tools that allow webmasters to test speed e.g.

If you find that your page speed is poor what can you do? It’s time to call your website developer and hosting company:

Can your developer incorporate some optimisations on loading?

Can images be optimised?

From the hosting side, are you on the basic level of server competing with hundreds of other websites for resource?

These are things which can be addressed but will probably cost you money in developer time and better hosting packages. But it might just be worth it. Google has announced that from July 2018 mobile page speed is going to be a ranking factor. Their research indicates that as page loading time increases from 1 second to 3 seconds, the probability of bounce increases by 32%. By 5 seconds, the probability increases to a huge 90%. Think about it. Your website is losing nearly all its traffic on mobile. Is it worth spending some money to keep those customers – and give your rankings a boost?

Failure to move to HTTPS

Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is the secure version of HTTP, the protocol over which data is transferred between your browser and the website that you are browsing. It means that all data that you send is secure and encrypted. Google has announced that from July 2018, all websites still on HTTP when browsed in chrome will display a warning about security of the website. This may mean that some of your customers do not visit your website out of fear. That’s not good. We also know already that HTTPS is a known ranking signal . So moving to HTTPS is a priority now for every website owner who cares about their traffic.

Believing social media is pointless

Google (or its employees anyway) has always said social signals are not a direct ranking factor. So for many business owners, this piece of information may make them glad that they haven’t wasted their time. In fact just recently Wetherspoons announced that they are quitting all social media as it wasn’t essential to their business. Wrong. Social signals may not be part of Google’s algorithm, but they do help SEO and your traffic immensely. JD Wetherspoons may not need to rely on Google as much as a small business whose brand is unknown.

Social media provides a means to amplify your new content – whether it is a blog, press release or new photos of a job you’ve completed. This can bring traffic to your website. Relying solely on organic traffic is risky as your website may take a dive as a result of an algorithmic update and you could lose everything. Having a mix of traffic from different channels is better.

Shares and Likes may give Google a nudge to go and find your content and index it which means that it can be discovered online and deliver traffic to your website.

Social media will boost your brand mentions and make Google believe that your brand is worthy of being associated with a particular service or product.

None of these things are show stoppers – your website will still be visible in Google and Bing. But it means that you are not squeezing out as much ranking power as you could be by ignoring these. What do you think?

Business Comment

Business Comment is the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce’s bi-monthly magazine. It provides insight on Edinburgh’s vibrant business community, with features on the city’s key sectors, interviews with leading figures and news on new business developments in the capital.